Last week, I wrote an introductory article on the importance of long tail keywords for web site SEO. As a starting point, I covered some of the basic concepts involved but would like to add a more in-depth piece for those who are interested in pursuing the subject a little further.
Keyword Competition
When we try to come up with appropriate keywords for our website, it’s relatively easy to identify the usual suspects:
- Photography
- Portrait
- Photographer
- Family portrait
- Wedding photographer
- … and so on…
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Photography Website SEO
long tail search, search engine optimization, SEO, web site
Search engine optimization (SEO), just like housework, is never done. Just when you think you might be finished, it’s time to start all over again! By the way if you do think SEO is something you only do once, or infrequently, for your web site you might need to rethink that idea.
SEO is a constantly moving target, and you need to be on the ball to try to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of search engine results. This is a lot of work, so knowing what things are most important is vital in keeping the workload to a minimum.
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Photography Website SEO
long tail search, search engine optimization, SEO
When it comes to designing the structure of your web site, should you use subfolders or subdomains to distinguish between separate areas of your photography business? This question is one of the first ones in many web designers’ minds when considering the impact on the SEO of the overall web site structure.
For those who might be unclear on the differences, here is a quick explanation. A subfolder is a directory or folder that exists as part of the main domain (in the same way that we use folders on our computer drives), whereas a subdomain is a separate domain that is part of the hierarchy of a larger domain.
For example:
“http://weddings.photographer.com/” would be a subdomain of the “photographer.com” domain, and could be used to hold the information relating just to wedding photography for the company concerned.
On the other hand, “http://www.photographer.com/weddings/” can fulfill the same purpose but refers to a subfolder of the “website.com” domain.
Both structures are equally valid, but which one should you choose? Does choosing one structure over the other confer any advantage in terms of the SEO for the site? In other words, how search-engine friendly are these two methods?
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Photography Website SEO
google analytics, search engine optimization, web design, web site
Do you want the ability to track your web site traffic, see where your visitors are coming from, look at the keywords they used to find you, see where in the world they are, and analyze which sites are sending you the most referrals? If so, Google Analytics might be able to help.
I am certainly no expert at using Google Analytics, but I would like to share some of my experiences with it, and hopefully encourage you to make use of it on your own web site. This is not meant to be an exhaustive article on the subject, but is aimed at giving the basics as well as an insight into some of the useful features.
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Photography Website SEO
google analytics, search engine optimization
When times are tough, it pays to explore creative, low-cost marketing solutions. One such strategy is using the professional social networking site LinkedIn to build your prospect database, turn cold calls into warm leads, and establish yourself as a subject-matter expert.
Just create a professional profile, send invitations to people you know to connect, request introductions to prospects your friends or colleagues know, and you’re off! And the best part is that you don’t have to spend a dime!
Here’s the low-down on what you need to know:
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Sales & Marketing
marketing, professional photographer, search engine optimization
Does your web site have a sitemap? Search engine crawlers are just like travelers in a foreign land – they do a lot better when they have a map to see where they’re going. However, the sitemap is one of the most often overlooked components of a web site. It certainly isn’t particularly attractive or fun to read, but it sure helps Google and the other search engines find their way about – leading to a better picture in the search index of your web site.
If you have a Word Press blog like this one, there are various plugins you can use to generate a sitemap of your blog for you. I use two:
Otherwise, producing your own sitemap is fairly easy but requires some skill with XML documents. There’s a lot of information about how to write a sitemap at www.sitemaps.org and also on the Google Sitemaps page.
You can see the sitemap for the Zenologue Blog here to get an idea of what a sitemap looks like in action.
Although a sitemap doesn’t necessarily mean an increased search engine ranking, if you haven’t already done so, I strongly suggest providing a sitemap on your site that will help both visitors and the search engines. You can register the sitemap with Google and the other major search engines, enabling them to crawl and index your site more effectively and quickly.
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
Generating good traffic to your web site has been a huge topic for a long time, and much has been written and discussed about it. A great proportion of the traffic to our web sites comes from the search engines, when people are looking for something in particular. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t Google something, it just seems to be one of the major ways people surf the web. One of the factors that influences your web page position in the search results is your page rank, which is the topic of this post.
Let’s try a quick exercise – go to Google, or your favorite search engine, and type in “professional photographer your town” (replacing “your town” with the name of your town or city, of course).
Is your web site in the list? If it’s on the first page then you’re doing very well. If not, then don’t despair; there are ways to get it there if you follow some of the tips on this blog and you are patient.
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
Search engine optimization relies heavily on the concept of links. After all, the modern mental picture we have of the World Wide Web is of a mass of interconnected pages, connected to other pages like neurons in our brains. Without links, there would be no web; only a loose connection of unrelated documents, and navigation around the web would be impossible.
The web, tangled as it is, is therefore a world based on back scratching. The hyperlink was one of the first tags to be invented when HTML was first developed, and it has changed little since then (see http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/ for more information). Hyperlinks simply link one piece of text to another by allowing the user to click on the appropriate text (or image or almost anything else these days).
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
We already talked briefly about the “keywords” meta-tag and how it isn’t really that useful these days when it comes to the process of search engine optimization. Now, we can take a look at one of the meta-tags that actually is useful – the “description” tag.
Perhaps you haven’t even heard of the description meta-tag before or, if you have, you may not think you’ve seen it, but I’m willing to bet that you have – you just might not realize it!
Every time you perform a search in Google, for example, you should see a page of results, each one with a heading you can click on to visit the site in question.
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
One of the questions I see often is “What keywords should I use in the meta-tags on my web page?”
The answer to the question, oddly enough, is actually “None.” Keywords, it seems, really might be extinct. But why?
In the early days of the world wide web, when web search engines were in their infancy, before the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” had even been thought of, the folks who set the standards for HTML coding decided that it might be a good idea for each web page to contain some useful information about itself.
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
One of the first steps to optimizing your site for the search engines is simply to have correct page titles. The title of a web page is the text that appears at the very top of the browser window when you view a web page, and its importance can be greatly underestimated.
When you perform a search in Google, Yahoo or the other search engines, you will see a page with a list of the results (unless you entered something strange and very obscure). The bold heading for each returned listing usually has one or more of the keywords you were searching for. I say “usually”, because that’s not always the case, as we’ll see in a later article. But, for now, let’s say that the search term you are looking for will generally appear in the heading of each returned listing.
The heading displayed for each result is, in fact, the title of the page you will be sent to if you were to click on the link.
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
One of the biggest challenges facing web site developers is how to drive more traffic to the web site. To the surprise of the beginner or inexperienced web-designer, the adage, “Build it and they will come”, doesn’t work in cyberspace. We can build it, make it look as flashy and as creative as we like, but no one will visit the site if they don’t know it’s out there.
There are several ways for your target audience to find out about your site, including:
- Search engines
- Links from other sites
- Your own print or web marketing
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
- Word of mouth
- Social networks
- Other paid advertising
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Photography Website SEO
search engine optimization
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